As marketing and sociology continue to collide, we're clearly witnessing the Cluetrain "markets are conversations" come to life.
Social networks have enabled ubiquitous two-way communication between individuals and brands alike. How do we make sense of all the cacophony?
(I've deliberately chosen to focus on brand conversations here but the majority of what I've written applies equally to individuals who are looking to build their own personal brands.)
Brands are grappling with understanding how:
- to better engage in meaningful and relevant conversations
- to add value to the multitude of online conversations going on across the globe
What are the metrics and metadata that are emerging to measure, manage and improve these conversations?
Although the ego effect exists and many still seem to be focused on how many followers they have, the true value of social networks goes way beyond the traditional reach measures of the (offline) broadcast model.
How much value you contribute to your social network on Twitter or how much value you contribute to the community on your blog (as an individual or as a brand) is more importantly about listening, reciprocating, networking, learning and giving.
One thing is self-evident - It is HARD work.
Chris Brogan recently wrote about this from the perspective of comments and David Armano wrote about the viral impact of retweeting and how it allows one to bridge different networks.
How do we take this further?
I recently came across Benedikt Koehler (profile here) who used the Twitter Search API to create Twitter Friends.
He provides a wealth of visualization tools and measures that bring us a lot closer to fully understanding the key metrics to value contribution within social networks. Let's look at the list of metrics he uses to build his "Twitgraphs" and understand how it works:
- Size of relevant outgoing network (people you engage in conversation)
- Size of relevant incoming network (people who engage in conversation with you)
- Fans = people who replied to you at least once (NOT followers)
- Loyalty ("Stickiness") = % of fans that replied at least twice
- Twitter Rank
- Overlap of outgoing and incoming net = indication of how much conversation is going on vs. one-way messaging / broadcasting
- Tweets sent / day
- Follow cost = annoyance factor measured as time in milliscobles
- Replies sent / day
- Conversation Quotient (CQ) = % of outbound tweets that are @replies to incoming tweets (indicating what percentage of your outbound messaging is conversation vs one-way broadcast)
- Conversational Rank (rank of conversation quotient)
- Replies received / day
- Retweet Quotient (RQ) = % of tweets sent that are retweeted
- Links posted / day
- Link Quotient (LQ) = % of tweets sent that include a link
- Replies with Links from friends / day
This may seem overwhelming at first but it makes a lot more sense once you see it represented visually in the Twitgraph.
Zappos vs. Comcast
Let's examine the above metrics for two of the most successful brands on Twitter: Zappos and Comcast.
@Zappos is the voice of Tony Hsieh, Zappos.com's CEO. He is one of 438 people at Zappos who actively converse on Twitter. He's also an active blogger with a dedicated CEO & COO blog amongst 13 other blogs at Zappos. Their social media strategy
is discussed here and here.
What do the numbers say about Tony's Twitter activity over the past 30 days?
- Despite having 43,000 followers, Tony has relatively little activity on Twitter.
- He sent only 4 tweets a day on average despite receiving 50 tweets a day
- Only 30% of his tweets were @replies (relatively low conversation quotient)
- 41% of his onbound tweets contain links, aimed at driving people to his blog where he promotes the people, products and culture of Zappos
UPDATE: Tony responded to me after reading this blog post and revealed an added dimension that is a very important piece of the puzzle: Private conversation vs Public conversation.
Here's his response: "Thanks for the great writeup. One thing I wanted to point out is that most of activity through Twitter is actually through DM's (direct messages), so they won't show up on my Twitter timeline. For the month of January, I sent out about 2000 DM's I send DM's instead of @ replies so that it doesn't clutter up the timeline when you go to http://twitter.com/zappos
It would be great if the conversation quotient took DM's into account (if someone sends me an @ message, I reply via DM which I would still count as a conversation), but Twitter doesn't make that information public."
@ComcastCares is the voice of Frank Eliason, Director
of Digital Care at Comcast. Frank has become a celebrity and is
frequently invited to talk at conferences about his customer service
activities on Twitter. Frank's mission is to bring a human voice to a company not known for its ability or desire to communicate with its customers.
Frank's numbers show how successfully he is at using Twitter to engage in dialog and solve people's cable problems. He's a digital conversation machine!
- Frank has 8,400 followers and so you'd expect that he'd be your classic celebrity broadcaster but that is not his goal. His goal is to serve people, listen to them and solve their problems
- Frank has 755 fans who are very local (41% loyalty)
- 55% of his incoming and outgoing networks overlap (lots of one-to-one real conversation)
- 98% of his tweets are @replies (high conversation quotient)
- He receives and replies to 50 tweets a day (high follow cost)
What does the Twitgraph say about their respective approaches to conversation on Twitter? Zappos appears to be more focused on mass one-way broadcasting with links to drive people to Zappo's various blogs. Comcastcares, however, is exclusively focused on solving individual customers' problems and has a very high conversation quotient.
Despite the differences between the two, their respective conversations bring a great deal of authenticity and transparency to their brands. They both communicate in a very human voice. This is a key take-away for those embarking on this journey. Conversations occur between people and are filled with human emotion. No-one will engage in a conversation with a faceless corporation.
Given my cursory analysis, the following five metrics appear to provide the greatest insights into underlying conversation strategy:
- Loyal fans (not number of followers)
- Conversation quotient
- Link quotient
- Retweet quotient
- Network overlap (between incoming and outgoing nets)
Before you go off and start to emulate these successful social networkers, remember to spend upfront time clearly establishing your social media goals. What are you trying to achieve? Are you ready to put in the hard work it takes to become a prolific and valuable conversationalist in the social space? Once you've articulated your goals you can look to build the appropriate Twitgraph to achieve them.
As always, I'd love to hear your perspectives, comments and feedback. I invite you to comment below.
David Feldt
Strategists & Planners
Comments (7)
Great post! The Twitgraph is quite interesting. Love all the metrics associated, very true. I think that Zappos and Comcast are utilizing twitter in the way they think fits their company. Obviously, Frank from Comcast should be more one on one with his fans because many people have problems with their cable and/or comcast's customer service. It makes Comcast look great answering questions on other platforms than their website. I think Tony from Zappos feels he can grab more people through his company site and his blogs, so he uses Twitter to redirect them to his blog, rightfully so. But showing he cares through Twitter by engaging more could possibly say a lot more about him to his followers, where he could pick up more loyalty points.
By the way Organic, Inc is an awesome agency. Just found you guys while job searching. Room for one more? j/k (not really though)
Posted on February 9, 2009 07:34
David:
Nice visualization - twitter is so interesting because it enables examination of the network relationships in such a detailed way.
Thanks for sharing.
Tom O'Brien
MotiveQuest LLC
Posted on February 9, 2009 07:36
Great post! The Twitgraph is quite interesting. Love all the metrics associated, very true. I think that Zappos and Comcast are utilizing twitter in the way they think fits their company. Obviously, Frank from Comcast should be more one on one with his fans because many people have problems with their cable and/or comcast's customer service. It makes Comcast look great answering questions on other platforms than their website. I think Tony from Zappos feels he can grab more people through his company site and his blogs, so he uses Twitter to redirect them to his blog, rightfully so. But showing he cares through Twitter by engaging more could possibly say a lot more about him to his followers, where he could pick up more loyalty points.
By the way Organic, Inc is an awesome agency. Just found you guys while job searching. Room for one more? j/k (not really though)
Posted on February 9, 2009 07:42
David - excellent post, and it's great that beyond simply sharing the analysis of a conversation, you continue to emphasize the hard work required to participate in the social media space.
Posted on February 9, 2009 09:24
Fantastic post. A great read in the subway. Merci!
Posted on February 10, 2009 04:21
The key nugget for me is David's advice to spend upfront time clearly establishing your social media goals.
As Frank's notoriety has grown, I've heard from an increasing number of companies who want to "do what Comcast does". If you're going to use twitter as a customer care tool, you had better be ready to engage. Frank is backed up by a superb team of troubleshooters who have the equipment and the connections to move quickly through our organization to link Tweeters with the help they need. Speedy resolution was one of our key objectives.
Beyond solving problems, we're using the data we get from these conversations to help us zero in on root causes. The idea of "one voice helping hundreds" resonates with us.
The other key is finding people who are truly passionate about what they do. Our Twitter initiative happened one late night when Frank and I were brainstorming, via instant messenger, on how we could leverage social media to build a closer relationship with our customers (there's that goal discussion again). Few are more passionate about that subject than Frank and his team. Tweeters will instantly call you out if your actions aren't in sync with your words.
Connect passion to cogent objectives and you're more likely to succeed in the Twittersphere and beyond.
Scott Westerman
Vice President
Comcast
@comcastscott on Twitter
Posted on February 10, 2009 21:45
UPDATE: Tony responded to me after reading this blog post and revealed an added dimension that is a very important piece of the puzzle: Private conversation vs Public conversation. The Twitgraph doesn't account for the private conversations going on via DMs on Twitter (direct messages). Tony actively uses DMs to reply. This strategy ensures that the follow cost remains low.
Here's his response:
"Thanks for the great writeup. One thing I wanted to point out is that most of activity through Twitter is actually through DM's (direct messages), so they won't show up on my Twitter timeline. For the month of January, I sent out about 2000 DM's I send DM's instead of @ replies so that it doesn't clutter up the timeline when you go to http://twitter.com/zappos
It would be great if the conversation quotient took DM's into account (if someone sends me an @ message, I reply via DM which I would still count as a conversation), but Twitter doesn't make that information public."
Posted on February 11, 2009 03:38